Moonseed

Free Moonseed by Stephen Baxter

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Authors: Stephen Baxter
open portico—some kind of unfinished temple, it seemed—and a telescope tower.
    Mike had been right that Edinburgh was the home of geology. The old igneous structures here had been studiedright from the beginning of the discipline. In fact James Hutton in the eighteenth century, based in Edinburgh, was the first to come up with modern theories of the processes that shaped Earth—the first man in history, perhaps, to understand the extent of the vast deserts of geological time that surrounded him.
    Henry wondered, briefly, how that must have felt: to be the only human on the planet who knew…
    I ought to sleep, he thought.
    He tried the TV. There were five main channels and cable and satellite. The main channels were full of soaps and other daytime bullshit. He found a British news channel called Sky and watched that for a while, but the news meant little to him. There was a story about problems for the Government over integration into Europe, and some kind of IRA bomb threat that had caused gridlock in Birmingham, and, my God, a riot in some part of Scotland—what looked like a dire residential area called the Gorbals, in Glasgow—a spokesman who said in a thick accent, We never accepted the Union of the Parliaments, and that’s that. It turned out he wasn’t talking about the modern devolved assembly but the abolition of a Scottish Parliament in favor of a single British one, which had happened, for God’s sake, in 1707. And then commentators on the Irish stuff talked about some guy called William of Orange, who had his fifteen minutes of fame in 1688.
    1707, 1688. Dates from prehistory for North America, dates as remote as 5000 B.C.
    There was no U.S. news at all.
    He tried to remember the last British news story he’d noticed back home. Some royal bullshit, probably.
    Britain, he was coming to see, was built on a long and complex history. Shame they hadn’t got more of it right, he thought.
    But then that was complacent. Britain was peaceful and prosperous and proud of itself and, hell, even pretty democratic. The U.S. should last to be a thousand years old; then we’ll see what shape we’re in…
    He flipped around until he found CNN. Lying on his bed, he studied baseball scores, one of his routines for conning himself to sleep.
    But, though he was tired, he was not sleepy, and some part of him was reacting to the fact that it wasn’t even midday outside, and the day was a-wasting.
    He’d done a lot of traveling in the course of his career. But he’d never yet got used to this planet-hopping.
    He considered raiding the room’s minibar. Or maybe he should go back to the institute and rattle McDiarmid’s cage a little more. Or maybe he should just go find a USA Today.
    Bored, sour, he got up, pulled on a fresh T-shirt, and walked out of the room.
     
    He found himself on Princes Street, a broad, straight road that ran east to west. It seemed to be the spine of the shopping area, and it was crowded with traffic and shoppers. The pedestrians were all in big floppy hats and baggy white clothes with their faces smeared with cream.
    The street’s north side was lined with plastic shop frontages, and on its south side there was a park called Princes Street Gardens: set in a valley, crammed with monuments and features. Pretty. But, Jesus, it was cold, a breeze gusting down the street like it was a wind tunnel. Henry, with just his T-shirt, wrapped his arms around his chest. Maybe he’d get more tolerant to this when he got over the loss of Houston’s muggy, comfortable warmth.
    Anyhow, if he was lucky he’d be out of here before winter came.
    He got his orientation quickly.
    He could see the asymmetrical profiles of Calton Hill and Castle Rock from here, with the heart of the city stretching between them, and Arthur’s Seat on the outskirts of the city, a blocky, uncompromising mound. The glaciers had flowed east over this place, scraping off theyounger sedimentary rocks and leaving these three igneous plugs

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